Professional Services Automation (PSA) software has lived at the heart of service business for decades, but it’s plagued by a number of major shortcomings that stunt growth and prevent profitability. More often than not, PSAs are overpriced, hard to use, and rely on busy professionals to manually enter data. People in service businesses – highly skilled and highly paid people – have better things to do than update databases, copy and paste emails, or do any of the other painful things that PSA technology forces users to do.
The solution? A client work management platform, which was born out of a common frustration with inefficient software. It's better and much smarter than traditional Professional Services Automation (PSA) software because it embraces your creative, chaotic reality and works for you – not against you.
In order to fully understand client work management solutions, take a moment and think back to the time you started your service business – be it a digital agency, consulting firm, or accounting practice – what did you imagine you’d be doing with your time? Designing websites? Developing software? Leading workshops? You were likely daydreaming about doing this kind of work you love - the work that generates revenue. But as you began to grow, where did that time go? It was probably spent doing the work you really don’t like, or heck, work you hate! This includes tasks like manually updating client records, filling out timesheets, and making sure your team is doing the right thing at the right time. Why? Because PSA software has failed you. That is, until now.
The most efficient way to run, scale, and automate your service operations with ease. The ubiquity of the cloud created an opening for this new category of technology, which runs the delivery and operations function of a service business or team. Accelo is optimized to meet the specific needs of service businesses and brings together client relationship management, sales & quoting, project management, service tickets, retainers, timesheets, expenses, and invoicing into one integrated platform to run all of your client-facing, revenue-generating work.
In effect, Accelo helps you scale and recover majority of the lost revenue and time that’s being wasted on inefficient PSA tools.
By uniting your team, clients, and data in one place, understanding the health of your business becomes a simple task. Answering common questions like “what happened today?” or “what do we need to do now?” will no longer take hours to figure out, and the time you would have previously spent searching for those answers can now be spent doing the work you love. The best part? The Accelo platform seamlessly integrates with the tools you’re already using - your Sales & Marketing tools like Hubspot and Salesforce and your Finance and Accounting systems like Xero and QuickBooks - so that you can deliver great client work and manage your operations all from the same place.
If you’re someone who is using a separate tool for sales, another for time tracking, a third for invoicing, and a CRM or PSA on top of all of that, then it might be time to consider implementing a client work management platform that unites everything from prospect through to payment, in one. Let me explain...
With super configurable client work management, selling is a breeze! You have the freedom to set your own workflow based on the various stages of a sale – such as lead, qualified, won or lost – and progress your clients through each sale status with ease. More importantly, you can see all the communication that’s ever been made between you and your clients in one Team Inbox without having to login to your email account or jump over to your CRM. From the same place, you can automatically send a quote to your client with just one click and get notified every time they interact with it. And if you’re someone who likes to change up the look and feel of your quotes, you can do that too, because a client work management platform lets you easily customize your quotes – roll-up line items, hide certain details like rates, hours or materials, and set an expiration date – giving you complete control over what your client sees.
For the sake of this debate, let’s assume that the previous quote was approved and it was your job to convert it into a project using your existing tech stack. How long would that currently take you? With Accelo, it literally takes seconds because you can go from a sale, to quote, to project in just a few clicks. With built-in project management tools, you can also create flexible project timelines using drag and drop Gantt charts, forecast profitability in real-time, and monitor budgets with ease. From the same dashboard, you can even assign or reassign work you no longer have time for to someone on your team who does - based on their schedule, skillset, or division - to ensure all of your projects stay on track and no one gets burned out. The best part? With automatic triggers, you’ll get notified whenever it looks like a project might be going off track to prevent scope creep before it’s too late!
Then once all the work is said and done, the last thing to do is bill for that work, right? With Accelo, you'll no longer need to jump out of your PSA and into a separate accounting tool - because you can bill from the same place you do work! Easily bill at the start of a project, in the end, by percentage, hourly rate, or by a fixed retainer fee - the options are endless. You can even bulk invoice or template recurring work using retainers so that you spend less time configuring workflows and more time doing the work you love!
If you’re ready to learn more about the power of Accelo and start driving your business forward with ease, click here to start your free trial and see the benefits in motion.
